Sometimes people will say, “Why did you have Sarah see the ghosts?” As if because she was white somehow she should have been left out of it and that’s not what culture and tradition and heritage are about. There are wondrous things of our humanity that we can share and teach and learn from each other. So, Sarah learns an important truth about how she’s going now decide to live her life. How she’s not going to be like her dad and have bias. How she’s going to be a civil rights advocate or somebody that’s going to be teaching her children, “Judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”
Well, Sarah, I wanted her on a technical level to sort of humanize the dad. But I also felt that I had met a lot of Sarah’s in schools, a lot of young white men and women and girls and actually they’re all from other ethnic heritage, whether it be Irish or Italian or Polish or Armenian, who knows, who had these really wondrous open-hearted souls.
And so, I’ve seen Sarah’s and seen their power. But I wanted to give children who may not have the same beliefs as their parents permission to differ from their parents’ ideas. So, it was very important for Sarah to say, “Dad, you were wrong. Dad, I’m not going to have that bias within me. And Dad, I still love you. Will you help me with my project?”
To me, that was the revelation. I actually thought Jerome, when he finally got Sarah to say, “Yes, I’m going to help everybody remember your name,” that Jerome would go away. And he wouldn’t leave and I couldn’t figure out “Why aren’t you leaving, Jerome?” And finally, Jerome says to Sarah, “Sarah, life is too short. You’ve got to make peace with your dad.” And when she’s able to then do that, Jerome is happy, she’s happier.
But she also has this image that “I can disagree with my dad, not be like my dad, but still love my dad.” That’s a very important thing to know, particularly if maybe you were raised in a home that has biases for different reasons.
It’s about letting our children lead their own lives, not a secondhand life just adopting what somebody has told them you should believe in. But critically thinking about “Who do I want to be in the world?”
And that’s why reading, writing, critical thinking is so important and they should be strengthened. No, you don’t need to be exactly like your parents. Your experience of the world is different. So, love them and make your own choices.